Language Arts - 7th Grade

• Childhood Through the Looking Glass
  The goals of this lesson plan are: (1) To learn about Lewis Carroll and the vision of childhood he created in Alice in Wonderland (2) To compare Carroll's Victorian world of childhood with the world of 'Innocence and Experience' portrayed by the Romantic poet William Blake; (3) To explore the relationship between picture and text in children's literature; (4) To consider the relationship between childhood fictions and the real experience of growing up.
• Investigating the Holocaust: A Collaborative Inquiry Project
  Students will read a range of Holocaust resources, from different genres and media; use a variety of resources to gather and synthesize knowledge about the Holocaust; work collaboratively to investigate questions about a specific topic; present information orally and in a group newspaper.
• Literature Circles: Getting Started
  This lesson from ReadWriteThink explores Literature Circles, a great way to supplement a reading program in a literature-based classroom. Students create and answer comprehension questions, discover new vocabulary, and examine elements of literature.
• Poems that Tell a Story
  In this lesson, students read, discuss, and analyze selected poems by Robert Frost. The activities that make up this lesson encourage students to draw inferences about a poem's speaker based on evidence contained within the poem and to gather evidence supporting those inferences. From this page, teachers can access all materials needed to complete the lesson.
• The Big Bad Wolf: Analyzing Point of View in Texts
  Many students read without questioning a text or analyzing the author's viewpoint. In this lesson from ReadWriteThink, students learn to look at texts from different viewpoints. Was the "big bad wolf" really bad? Throughout the lesson, students are encouraged to view texts from different angles.
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
  Washington Irving's tale of the Headless Horseman has become a Halloween classic, although few Americans celebrated that holiday when the story was new. In this unit from EDSITEment, students explore the artistry that helped make Irving our nation's first literary master and ponder the mystery that now haunts every Halloween--What happened to Ichabod Crane?
• The Reading Performance
  This lesson from ReadWritethink presents an adaptation of the oral recitation lesson: students talk in explicit terms about prosody and gain a new appreciation for written literature intended for oral performance. Technology activities are integrated to instill the value of technology in shaping students' life-long appreciation of literature.
• The World of Haiku
  In this lesson, students explore the traditions and conventions of haiku, comparing this classic form of Japanese poetry to a related genre of Japanese visual art and composing haiku of their own.